Bookworm Room

I’m blessed to have made a lot of good friends in the blogosphere, and this morning I got a bunch of emails from them, all of which were intriguing, thoughtful and even exciting discussions of current affairs.  I pass them on to you: Kim Priestap and the Anchoress both think that Elena Kagan may be [...]

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Cool. UPDATE:  Thanks, Cottus.  The typos I make, of course, are meant to ensure that, despite my impressive pedigree (which, Obama-like, I’ll keep hidden from you and, instead, I’ll just repeat that it really is as impressive as I say it is), I’m still one of “the little people.”

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One of my favorite organizations is the Navy League.  I wrote this post last September to encourage people to check it out.  I’m reprinting it today, slightly modified, because, for no clear reason, the Navy League has been in my mind.  I guess the dog days of Spring already have me longing for the October [...]

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Well, I finally got around to seeing The Blind Side.  For those unfamiliar with the movie, it retells the true story of Michael Oher, a profoundly disadvantaged black boy who ended up as a scholarship student at a Christian academy in Memphis.  Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, parents at the school, stumbled across him, and [...]

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J.C. Arenas on the laundry list of qualifications for Obama’s Supreme Court picks: Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment was Sonia Sotomayor, the Bronx-bred daughter of Puerto Rican parents, who supposedly was a valedictorian student with a deficiency in English and become an Ivy-League educated jurist credited with saving Major League Baseball. Now we have Elena [...]

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Dennis Prager writes a long and interesting column detailing the way in which the Left resolutely refuses to conflate two ideas:  terrorism and Islam.  He then wraps it up with a conclusion that operates only if you accept Prager’s view of the world, but that is meaningless to the average Leftist: The Left’s inability to [...]

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Never assume stupidity when malevolence can apply — words that aptly characterize the Obama administration’s approach to Israel.  Evelyn Gordon takes a look at the new “proximity” talks between Israel and the Palestinians, talks that no one expects to yield any results.   After all, the predicate is that the Obama administration has made demands only [...]

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The Progressives are characterized by solemnity and pomposity.  They take themselves very, very seriously.  Barbara Boxer personified this obsession with self-worth when she chastised a general for respectfully addressing her as “Ma’am” instead of “Senator.”  I really wonder if she thought people were impressed by her thin skin and self-aggrandizement.  As the Anchoress says, though, [...]

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I know that much is being said amongst both Progressives and Conservatives about Kagan’s possible lesbianism.  Progressives are mad at her for being in the closet; Conservatives are worried about her orientation affecting her rulings as a Supreme Court judge.  Both are completely wrong. Regarding the Progressive’s disdain for Kagan’s decision to keep her private [...]

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From James Lewis’ must-read article today about the effect of Iran’s ICBM’s (which it has spread throughout the Middle East) and its future nuclear arsenal: Mahmoud Ahmadijenad is the aggressive chess player behind all these missiles surrounding Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Iranian strategy has been to move its missile assets closer and closer to its [...]

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I’d like to analyze a Harvard’s law prof’s defense of a Harvard law dean.  The Prof (and ex-dean himself) is Robert Clark, who wrote an op-ed in the WSJ defending Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s approach to the military during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law.  He spells out the facts, which I’ll accept [...]

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Whenever it comes to mentioning presidential policy, this New York Times article about the collapse of AIDS care in Africa is studiously neutral.  Read between the lines (and make it almost to the end of the article), though, and you’ll see the truth peek out:  Bush, the quintessential “white man,” helped Africa enormously, while Obama, [...]

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If you read nothing else today, please read Fouad Ajami’s devastating indictment of the Islamic culture, a culture that encourages perpetual disaffection and anger with the world at large: ‘A Muslim has no nationality except his belief,” the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb’s “children” are everywhere now; they [...]

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To no one’s surprise, Obama nominated Elena Kagan to fill the opening on the Supreme Court.  Many have pointed to the fact that she’s never served as a judge before as one of the main reasons Obama did so — she has no paper trail.  Since I have a generally low estimation of judges at [...]

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One of the frustrating things about conversing with liberals is that, even as they’ll concede that socialism in Russia and China and Cuba and North Korea is not, or was not, a good thing, they’ve always got Europe to fall back upon. European socialism works, I am told.  Europeans have assured housing, assured medical care, [...]

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I always enjoy James Taranto’s writing.  Today, however, he wrote something almost transcendent about the liberal misunderstanding of science’s incredibly important role in a healthy, functioning modern society: The notion that conservatives or Republicans are “antiscience” is a liberal Democratic talking point of long standing, but what exactly does it mean? Largely it is an [...]

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Sorry for the silence this morning, but I have a good excuse.  I got cellulitis, which is, at first glance, merely painful.  The problem is that, if it doesn’t go away spontaneously, as the Mayo Clinic warns, “the spreading infection may rapidly turn life-threatening.”  I knew that, since I’ve known people who have had it [...]

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I’m generally not a union fan, because I believe that unions have become inherently corrupt organizations that stifle business growth in America, something that harms the very people they’re supposed to represent.  At the government level, government unions have completely gained the upper hand, so much so that the government merely signs the checks, without [...]

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Twice in the last two days, liberals have thrown at me the fact that America has a higher infant morality rate than countries with socialized medicine — even, they add, higher than “third world countries.”  I respond by repeating to them the famous saying Mark Twain popularized, about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” What I [...]

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As best as I can tell, the big objection to Arizona’s law is that, despite being facially neutral, it will primarily effect Hispanics.  This isn’t because Arizona is targeting only Hispanics, it’s because Hispanics are the only targets.  There aren’t a lot of blond Danes wandering around Southern Arizona’s border towns. It occurred to me [...]

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The Council has spoken and, as is usually the case, I heartily concur (although I sometimes wish that everyone could end up in first place, since the submissions are so stellar): Council Winners First place with 2 2/3 votes! – Wolf Howling -The Roots Of Slavery & The Races Hustlers’ Holy Grail – Reparations Second [...]

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With the publication of Jonathan Alter’s new book on the first year of the Obama administration, a lot of unsavory details are leaking out about No Drama Obama (Mr. Calm and Collected) and his crew.  We already know now that Obama refers to those Americans who oppose him as Tea Baggers, a sexually unsavory term. [...]

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UPDATE:  I’m reprinting here Baseballmaven’s comment: This was sent to me also–researching on Snopes,  while the d’Lynn part wasn’t there; however, the part about the welfare recipient in Florida was there and turned out to be NOT TRUE..variations have been circulating since 2004. The original example actually came from Canada, and even there wasn’t validated. [...]

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I’m not a San Francisco voter, nor am I familiar with the GOP in that District.  (All I know is that stalwart SF GOPers must truly be of hardy stock.)  Having received this email, however, I wanted to pass it on to you, for what it’s worth.  It’s not an endorsement (because I don’t know [...]

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